It was my mother’s whole life I didn’t want to see going up in flames, or down in flames, or crumbling into ashes, or whatever would happen if she were to find out that Pops had another woman. Mumma’s vanity, and her own integrity, would require her to leave him. Or, I wondered, was she the kind of woman who would throw him out? The important aspects of his life comprised his teaching, his scholarship, his marriage, and his family. But he was the only core and center of her life. If the marriage ended, Mumma’s life could be utterly changed.
I admit it, that insight left me breathless, poised at the edge of possibility. What would Mumma do? Without Pops, a single woman, what would she do? Would she liquidate her assets and leave Pops to live on his salary and a much diminished trust fund income, re-situating herself? Where would Mumma go? Where wouldn’t she go? After their first visit to Brundy in Paris, Mumma’s opinion of Europe had undergone a complete revision. She bought records to teach herself French and had Brundy ship her cases of fig jam. Also, she had always spoken longingly of California weather, and California soil, and the kind of people who wanted to live in California, as opposed to New England, and Boston, and even the Cape. As well, she was fascinated by politics and knowledgeable about issues; she was a dedicated member of the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, Common Cause, Planned Parenthood, generous with her donations and her time. What Mumma might get up to next—I would have loved to have seen it. I would have loved it to have happened for her.
What she wouldn’t have done (there was no question about this in my mind) was mope and mourn. “Life’s short,” she always said, meaning, Life’s too short for whatever useless mental or emotional occupation a person might waste her time on. That was, I always thought, good advice, and she followed it herself, never becoming disheartened by her various losses of the various elections for presidencies (PTA, garden club) or chairmanships (library board, hospital board), or even, twice, town council seats. She also always accepted the appointments her former rivals asked her to undertake after they had been elected to the higher position. “Life’s too short not to be generous,” she said when, for example, Jonquil Cartenbury needed a friend and no one else stepped forward. So if Pops had betrayed her, it seemed clear that Mumma would have moved on and arrived…My imagination soared. It would be an adventure, no question. I was almost sorry that I would never tell her.
Now, years later, I was finally letting my middle-aged sisters in on the secret that until then only George had known. “The only person I wanted to tell was Pops, and I wanted to talk to him because I wanted to make him stop.”
“Stop seeing the woman, you mean.”
“Yes. I thought that if he knew I knew, and knew I’d face him with it, he’d give her up. But that wasn’t what he was saying to me. So I had to think of something else.”
“Short of telling Mumma, what else could you do?” Meg asked.
It was Pops himself who had shown me how. He’d said, to comfort me, “You should understand, Beth, that this doesn’t mean…This is about Nanette, not your mother. Whatever happens, your mother will be fine. You must know that.”
“I do,” I told him.
“She doesn’t need me. She doesn’t need anyone.”
“But she likes having us. She wants us.”
“I know that, of course, and I respect it. I’m just trying to reassure you.”
“But what about Nanette?” I had asked him then, and that was my brainstorm. Because I understood then that this woman did need Pops, or someone. She was a needer, and needers attract people to take care of them, to fall in love with them, or to shovel their sidewalks for them. I could see, also, that to be needed, for Pops, might be utterly seductive. “If she’s in love with you”—he nodded his head, smiled shyly, amazed at this unexpected gift— “and I can see that that’s great, and I don’t blame her, but…If you’re not going to leave Mumma for her, what about her? That’s not much of a life for her, is it? I mean, unless you don’t love her.”
“Your mother couldn’t bear it if I loved somebody else,” Pops said, shaking his head. “Nanette doesn’t mind that I’m married,” he confided, a proud secret.
“Well of course not, but I’d think you’d mind. Treating her that way. Using up her life, I mean. You know what I mean, Pops,” I said, and I could see in his face that I didn’t need to say any more.
“All right,” he said, vague and inattentive now, rethinking everything. “Thank you,” he said.
“Because,” I said years later to my sisters, “he really hadn’t thought about it from that point of view, and he really did thank me for helping him see it that way, because he really did love her. Because Pops wouldn’t ever just mess around, in some midlife crisis. He had integrity.”
“After that spring he never taught the BU course again,” Meg remembered.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Amy said.
“Yes it does, because then he would have had to lie about going into Boston,” Jo said. “Or anywhere else that would give him enough time. For an affair, I mean, to meet someone. And you could never lie to Mumma. She had a real good ratcatcher. She always knew.”
We smiled, a little conspiratorially, remembering the several times she had caught one of the others out, and I didn’t think I could be the only one who had, at least once, gotten away with it with Mumma.
Amy brought us back to the subject at hand. “Did he forget about the mistress, do you think? Eventually he must have. I never got the sense that he was pining for someone. Did any of you?”
The waitress came to clear away dessert and I asked for the check and Jo asked, “Did she marry her tenant? I bet she did. Propinquity.”
“Or at least take up with him,” I said.
“Does that mean she did?” Jo asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“You mean after all that detective work you never went back to find out what happened to her?” Meg asked.
“Pops wanted me to leave her to him, so I did.”
Without taking the check from our waitress, I handed her four credit cards. Whenever we went out together, nobody was anybody’s guest. Because Mumma had insisted on being the person who paid whenever she was out with any of us, or all of us, we were all stiff-necked about paying our own way. If you never allow your children to take you out, to dinner, to the movies, for coffee, it’s a way of denying their equality with you, like never letting them drive. Mumma never let any of us drive, either, once we were licensed; she only ever let Pops drive her, and then only for social purposes, so that everyone could see that he was the man of the family. When we were young, my sisters and I shared the driving equally, and as adults, in restaurants, we split the checks four ways—among the four of us, there will be equality.
“Probably Pops’ girlfriend had married before she finished her degree,” Meg deduced.
“Unless she never started it,” Amy said. “If she got married very young.”
“I can’t imagine Pops with someone who wasn’t educated,” Meg said.
“Imagine him with Mumma,” Jo advised.
“Mumma is educated. She’s self-educated,” Meg argued. “But Mumma is unusual. No, don’t make fun of me, I mean, she was determined to be an educated person.”
“Then why didn’t she go to college?” I asked, not for the first time. “When we were little, before Polly got married, she could have gone to school.”
“Being Pops’ wife was a serious job to her,” Meg reminded us. “She was making their place in the community, which was what good wives did for their husbands.”
“You want to hear what I think?” I asked, and gave them no time to decline the offer. “I always thought she was afraid to go to college.”
“Would you blame her?” Jo asked. We all accepted our credit cards and our quarter bills from the waitress, did not consult one another about the tip, signed the slips, and replaced the cards in our wallets. Jo continued, “Anyway, this woman was probably smart enough. Al
though I don’t see why she’d have to be, for Pops to fall in love with her.”
“And then he gave her up,” Amy said. “He was a good husband, wasn’t he?”
“That was the summer he took Mumma to Paris, and rented an apartment for a month,” I told them. “Remember? Pops stayed on, he changed all his plans, and they went to the Riviera to that nunnery, to see the Matisse stained glass because Mumma loved Matisse.”
We smiled at one another, fond smiles, at the memory of our parents’ marriage. “End of story,” Meg said with satisfaction.
“Actually, no, it isn’t,” I told them, and savored—I admit it—the surprise on their faces. “It was the end for Pops, but there’s more.”
We left the restaurant and walked across the new grass, none of us having been so foolish as to wear more than the lowest heels even on that day. We were on the Cape, where we always wanted to drift off the roadway, or the path, onto the grass, or out onto the beach, up onto the dunes. In the harbor, sailboats rocked gently at their moorings and sunlight reflected off the water. It was a child’s picture, the freshly painted hulls and the deep blue sky with impossibly puffy white clouds floating dreamily across it. I felt a swelling of contentment, to be where I was, in the company I was in, on such a day. Despite the sadness of Mumma, we had done what we all felt was the right thing for her. We were taking care of her together; we were sisters. “Remember Pops’ funeral?” I asked them.
• • •
March is a good month for death. There are no holidays in March to be annually tainted by sorrow, and the weather is conducive to a sense of loss, and fear, and emptiness. At least in New England, that’s how it is. Pops died in March. In fact, he died over most of March, having his stroke in the first sleety week and lingering on in a coma for eighteen days after that, with the wind constantly blowing and the skies constantly changing from gray to blue and back to gray again. For us—his family, his wife and daughters, their spouses and significant others, his grandchildren—for those of us who loved him, this was the kindest and most thoughtful of exits, entirely in character, as I think to myself every March while I watch winter make its slow retreat from the sky and sea, all that slow, sad month. A sudden exit leaves abrupt silences, too much unsaid, even unthought. A relatively slow exit, even if the dying person is unable to make the least gesture, gives you the chance to realize what it is you have wanted to say, whether you actually say it or not, whether you are responded to or not.
Not that that was the way I felt at the time. Not that all of us didn’t hope fervently, at first, that he might make a good recovery. But then he didn’t. He had his stroke, and after only three days he slipped quietly into a coma from which we eventually came to hope that he would never wake. Pops obliged.
During those weeks we gathered together at Mumma’s house, taking turns visiting him in the hospital. The daughters taking turns, that is. Mumma was at his bedside almost constantly, and especially during the first long nights when his unconsciousness was incomplete. “He doesn’t want to be left alone,” she told us, and we believed her. Pops’ eyes, when open, fixed on Mumma. He glanced at others of us, and at the nurses too, but he looked at Mumma.
Mumma dressed up to sit beside Pops and read aloud to him, in stockings and the high heels she always wore, something different every day, different styles, different colors. “He was always proud of the way I look,” she told us. “He likes colors, so I don’t want to see any of you wearing dark and gloomy. Not for your father, who was never gloomy. He deserves bright things.”
I don’t know what the nursing staffs made of us, either in the hospital or in the long-term care facility. We sat beside Pops’ bed, Mumma and whoever, and sometimes we would talk to him, and sometimes we would talk among ourselves, but mostly we read aloud to him. Mumma chose the book, War and Peace, big surprise. “He loved that book and if you haven’t read it already, you should, so now’s your chance,” she told us. “He likes to hear familiar voices,” she told us, then clarified, “He likes to hear our voices.”
Pops showed no awareness of our readings, but we carried on, page after page, making our way through most of the one thousand, five hundred and forty-nine pages of the Modern Library edition. (“Don’t read the battle scenes,” Mumma instructed us. “One war was enough for him.”) The machinery Pops lived on hummed and we sat beside his bed making equally monotonous sounds. Pops lay still, eyes closed, chest barely moving, and thus we each made our own slow farewell to our father.
Mumma, however, was not about to make any farewells. She wasn’t giving up. “After this, we’ll read him Moby Dick, and after that…” She hesitated.
“Not Little Women,” Meg requested.
“No, he doesn’t much care for women writers, except—you know the one, I can’t dredge up her name just now.”
“Jane Austen? George Eliot? P. D. James?” we suggested.
“That’s her,” Mumma said, her face brightening. “No, I was thinking of the Dickens novel next. About—You know the one, it’s got that handsome boy who seduces the girl then dies in a shipwreck.”
“Copperfield,” we said. “Steerforth.”
“I don’t know the second one, but it’s Copperfield, David Copperfield,” she seized on the title. “He’d like hearing that.”
Mumma was tired and preoccupied, busy keeping Pops alive, and we were only too glad to supply her with names and titles, and whatever other help we could offer. The Howlands did what they could, or wanted to. Anne and Giancarlo visited the hospital regularly, she in the mornings before lunch, he in the evenings, after work. Pops’ youngest sister Juliet came in one weekend from the western part of the state, where thirty years earlier she had established a Montessori school, now a going concern with more than two hundred students and its own board of directors, one of which was Pops. When she was in her mid-forties, long an established spinster who we all thought might be a closet lesbian, Juliet had married a man twelve years younger than she, one of her teachers, a plump, bearded, sweet-tempered man, so ill at ease anywhere away from the school that he never left it. At the hospital, Juliet sat beside Pops’ bed and worked on papers she had taken out of her briefcase, while one of us read aloud. She raised her glance to him, every now and then, and sighed, saying softly, “He was such a nice boy, a good brother,” and, “It’s like a library in here. Conducive to good thinking.”
From the West Coast, Uncle Ethan sent flowers that the hospital wouldn’t allow in Pops’ room. Ethan had moved west after Grandmother died and he inherited the Louisburg Square house, which he immediately sold. The rest of the family, as far out as second cousins, tried to dissuade him from doing this, but that only goaded him into quicker action. He sold the furnishings at auction, which those relatives, if they cared so damned much, could damned well attend as buyers. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t given the family first refusal, but if nobody could meet his price, what did they expect him to do? Mumma explained it to us—and Pops agreed—“We don’t want the house, that’s the first thing, because if your father did, I’d find a way. And your uncle is the kind of man who when he knows he’s in the wrong, he gets angry at you. You girls are lucky to have him for an uncle so you can learn what that kind of man is like. Women will use anger, too, although they don’t do it in the same way, and you’re lucky he’s moving west because he’s not the kind of uncle any mother wants to have around her daughters. Out there, he’s just normal.” So Uncle Ethan sent a huge bouquet of lilies that we left out on the porch, not wanting to take them into the house with us; they obliged us by being dead in the morning, after a single sharp Cape Cod March night. Brundy had died two years earlier, in Paris, and been buried there, but Tonio, his companion of twenty-two years, who had traveled with Brundy and Mumma and Pops, which he maintained made them all his relatives too, sent tulips every five days. Tonio’s flowers we put on the kitchen table, changing the water every day and regularly cutting back the stems so that they would stay fresh as long as possible. Pops cou
ldn’t have flowers, but whoever was reading would bring a single tulip with her, from France, from Brundy. It sat in a bud vase beside his bed; she took it away when she left.
We daughters took turns coming to stay, for two or three days at a time. On weekends we tried to be there together for at least one of the nights. Meg drove down from Wayland, Amy from Wellesley, while Jo took a bus from South Station, unless I was driving down from our Avon Hill house and could give her a ride. We brought children when we had to. Sarah was often with me, and it cheered Mumma to have a baby in the house, someone to cuddle and complain about. My nieces and nephews, Meg’s and Amy’s broods, were all in their teens by then, old enough to make hospital visits. One of my sisters, usually Jo, would take care of my older girls when I sat with Pops, unless they came in with their older cousins for a visit. Those cousins met at Mumma’s house before going on to the hospital or, after Pops was moved, to the nursing home. They were too young, too healthy, a blast of bright fresh air, and Mumma would abandon Pops to them. “I need a break. Those boys of yours, Meg, I don’t know where they get the energy. If Spencer hadn’t already done it, having them there with him in that shape would give him a second stroke. Don’t get me wrong, I love them dearly, and it’s refreshing for the staff to have them charging around the place. The nurses scatter, like ducks off a pond. They’re not used to healthy people.” While the grandchildren visited Pops, Mumma would go home, take a shower, “Put my feet up,” and then get dressed. “He always liked me in yellow. Your girls have been with him long enough, Amy. I’m going to send them home. It’s not good for young people to see too much sickness. It discourages them.”
“They love Pops,” we protested. “Of course they do,” Mumma said. “That’s why I’m giving them this chance to say goodbye to him. What do you think, that I’d be jealous of my own grandchildren? But he’s happier when I’m with him. So go to bed, don’t stay up too late talking about me the way you always like to.”